Catch up TV...

Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? Nick Curtis looks at the shows you should have watched (and still can) and the upcoming must-sees

Friday 27 September 2013 11:44 BST

The closest I have yet come to booking a one-way ticket to Dignitas was during the row over the ruddy place settings in Downton Abbey (ITV Player). Were the spoons in the right place? Was it the “nursery” setting that has royal endorsement? Great suffering Christ, this epitomised all that is wrong with Julian Fellowes’s toff-u-soap and all that is right with it too. I know radical socialists who hate themselves for watching this feudal pap, and even the fans admit it’s rubbish, but it plays so expertly on the British obsessions with class and heritage and… just… bloody… FUSS AND FAFF that it rolls all over the TV ratings and the national discourse like a tank the size of Highclere Castle.

So where are we in Season 4? The 1920s, for one thing. Matthew is dead and Lady Mary is wafting around the castle like a Mogadonned ghost. The earl is doing his usual thing of repeating variations on the same line throughout an entire episode, in this case that Lady Mary has had a “terrble, terrble” shock so the running of the estate should revert to him, heh heh.

Cook is struggling with these here new-fangled egg-beating contraptions. The most obviously evil nanny since Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was unmasked and sacked, turning the outflow of servants from a trickle to a spurt. Honestly, you just can’t get the staff, can you? Fortunately, Edna Braithwaite came back, promoted from the kitchen to the bedroom, her minxy smile a promise of mischief to come. There was a serious-ish theme developed about the love we owe our friends and our children, but I was distracted from it because the kedgeree spoon was to the left of the pheasant mattock.

Back in the modern world, if not the real one, comedy-thriller The Wrong Mans (BBC iPlayer) thrived on improbable happenings. The motive one is that council functionary Sam (Mathew Baynton) picks up a ringing phone after witnessing a car crash, and becomes the only hope of a woman apparently kidnapped by gangsters. The best one, though, was when Sam, searching for clues in a hospital, almost had his leg amputated in error. James Corden, as his sidekick, plays a variation on the Smithy character from Gavin and Stacey. It’s quite fun. So far.

The most compelling 14 minutes on screen this week, though, was undoubtedly Damian McBride’s Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman (YouTube), in which the sometime thug of a spin doctor guilelessly admitted he’d done “far worse things” than the smears, leaks and fit-ups listed in his current book. It was like eavesdropping on an AA meeting. Creepily fascinating.

STAY IN FOR...

The IT Crowd

Tonight, Channel 4, 9pm

A welcome encore-cum-swansong for Graham Linehan’s office sitcom, a slow-burner that became a cult and made stars of Chris O’Dowd, Richard Ayoade and — to an undeservedly lesser extent — Katherine Parkinson. “I will not be a social piranha!” Brilliant.

Atlantis

Tomorrow, BBC1, 8.25pm

The Beeb’s latest bid to capture family imaginations on a Saturday night sees a modern-day Jason (Jack Donnelly) pitched back to the ancient Greece of gods and monsters. Hokey, then, with a fair amount of CGI and “Hello, I’m Pythagoras” glibness, but agreeable.

And get ready for...

Veep

Oct 16, Sky Atlantic

The second series of Armando Iannucci’s peerless politicom finally arrives in the wake of Emmy wins for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s hapless Vice-Prez Selina Meyer, and Tony Hale as her adoring factotum Gary.

SERIAL BOX

No apologies for writing again about Peaky Blinders (BBC iPlayer), which continues to enthral despite a script that has more signposts than the National Trust. There’s something in the atmosphere, the accents and the incremental shifts in power. More crucially, even, it feels different to just about anything else. We’ve got so used to the canard that TV is terrific at the moment, it’s a shock to realise again how much of it is derivative and weak.

By Any Means (iPlayer) is one of those glib, snappy-backchatty ensemble shows where a team of cops or crooks work together to put something over on someone else (cf Hustle, New Tricks). I marginally preferred Orphan Black (BBC iPlayer), which pitched con artist Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) into a nightmare of identity confusion and possible cloning but filled the background with caricatures from Secret Diary of a Call Girl.